Academic work:
1. “Dogs and Monsters: Observations on the Evacuation of Afghanistan and the Intersection of Human Rights and the Anthropocene.” Intertexts 26.2 (October 2023): 52-77.
During the 2021 U.S.-coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaotic evacuation of Kabul that accompanied it, intense media attention surrounded the British evacuation of several hundred animals rescued by the charity Nowzad Dogs. Even more media attention surrounded the revelation that the British government had, at the same time, failed to evacuate British citizens, British allies, and Nowzad Dogs' Afghan staff. This paper, exploring the logic that underlay these events, draws together the "canine rescue narrative" (Bose) and its utility for neoliberal capitalism, the human rights spectacle (Hesford) in media coverage of the evacuation, and questions concerning how human rights personhood is rhetorically constructed and mobilized in the Anthropocene. Though the Anthropocene is generally understood as an era of unparalleled human agency, this paper proposes that it is in fact an era of unparalleled human lack of agency, and that much energy is expended in obscuring the shared position of humans and nonhumans as objectified. Only through attention to this shared position, the paper suggests, can we resolve the tensions that characterize the Anthropocene.
2. “Nature is Healing: Reading Covid-19 Narratives Through the Fantasy of Infinite Nature at Chernobyl.” CR: The New Centennial Review, forthcoming.
The first wave of lockdowns associated with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic were marked by such media celebration of a perceived re-emergence of animal life that The New York Times coined a term for what it called the "coronavirus nature genre": texts that would soon be parodied with the meme tag: "Nature is healing. We are the virus." As a narrative turn, this celebration of nonhuman liveliness echoed extant discourse surrounding the Exclusion Zone created by the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. From the start of the twenty-first century, discussions of the Exclusion Zone have ignored concerns about the health of contaminated plant and animal life in favor of portraying it as a posthuman wilderness, a “paradise” for animals where previously scarce populations of birds, boar, and wolves thrive. Drawing together readings of Chernobyl media, the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum, and tourism in the Zone, I trace this "eco-optimist" narrative’s relationship to fantasies about the durable and boundless fruitfulness of nonhuman nature. I argue that the eco-optimist narrative arises in response to what Ted Toadvine has diagnosed, with reference to Nancy and Derrida, as fears of a world that cannot end. The function of eco-optimist fantasies is to reinscribe humanity as central, meaning-making subject of nature at a time when this role is under threat. Examining both radiation and coronavirus as sources of ontological anxiety, I suggest that human relationship with the nonhuman world must involve an embrace both of what Elizabeth Povinelli terms "geontologies" and of our own inherently limited perspective on a limitless world.
3. “Autobiography and Ecofeminism” in The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature (ed. Douglas Vakoch).
This chapter briefly summarizes an ecofeminist approach to autobiography while centrally focusing on the emerging genre of material memoir, which environmental theorist Stacy Alaimo classifies as a form of self-reflective writing that "incorporates scientific and medical information in order to make sense of personal experience" (Alamo 2010 87). Comparing Alaimo's embrace of material memoir and its "ordinary experts" to the resurgent anti- science/anti-vaccination movement, the chapter also engages in ecocritical analysis of material memoirs in order to argue that environmental writers and theorists have often engaged in "uncritical reversal" (Plumwood 1992) of dualisms to their detriment. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that an ecofeminist reading of material memoir requires a much more robust destabilization of nature/culture and subject/object dualisms than has so far been offered in the environmental humanities.
4. “Dead Gods and Geontopower: An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth,” in Life, Re-Scaled (ed. Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patois).
Jeff Lemire’s 2009-2013 graphic novel/comic series Sweet Tooth centers around the impact of an ancient nonhuman force that has been disinterred from the Arctic. This force, framed as both macroscopic in its reach and microscopic in its elements in ways that both recall and challenge Morton's definition of the hyperobject, raises important questions about the conceptualization of being under settler capitalism. It results in a mysterious plague responsible for destroying human civilization, and the birth of animal-hybrid children that rise to reclaim the earth. This chapter reads Sweet Tooth through the lens of real-life concerns about resource extraction and the way it confounds settler capitalism knowledge practices, mobilizing Povinelli's notion of geontopower and Barad's analysis of onto-epistemology in order to suggest new relational approaches to the complicated scales of being that confront us in the Anthropocene.
Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel Distancia de rescate, published in English as Fever Dream, tells the unsettling tale of a mother who, while vacationing in a rural area of Argentina, may or may not be exposed to a toxic agricultural chemical that may or may not have poisoned the area’s children, who have been subjected to an unconventional healing treatment that may or may not have displaced their souls from their bodies, causing pieces of them to reside in someone else. The novel has been read as “a toxic ecohorror tale” (Meyer) or as an “ecological horror story... about toxic agribusiness” (Economist), yet here I argue for another interpretation of Fever Dream: one that utilizes the tropes of what Stacy Alaimo characterizes as the “material memoir,” peeling back their familiarity to expose a toxic uncanny and literalizing the leaky, confused human subject that is found dwelling in it. The novel’s ambivalent, dread-laced depiction of a posthumanist reality in which the whole, complete, and “real” human subject is unrecoverable— and in which we contaminate and are contaminated by the familiar body of the human other as well as the foreign body of the nonhuman threat— offers, I suggest, the possibility of a new approach to ethics of responsibility in the Anthropocene.
Mutation in the Marvel Comics universe has been read as an allegory for many categories of difference— most prominently, race and sexuality. More recently, pop culture commentators have noted the ways in which mutation seems to function as a form of disability. Indeed, mutation can sometimes take the form of the prosthetic: drawing attention to absent or excessive body parts, as well as manifesting as physical abnormalities that must be “corrected” or “constrained” with technology. Broadly speaking, mutation might be understood as what Rosemarie Garland-Thompson refers to as “matter out of place,” troubling the binaries of both able/disabled bodies and human/environment with bodies that insist on remaining “human-ish.” In this paper, I examine two characters from the 2002 comics title X-Statix who foreground the disruption of these boundaries, and whose mutant bodies suggest the need for new ways of understanding the transcorporeal subject. I ask how the collision of discourses of the body can offer productive solutions to the conceptual problems with which we are presented by our current environmental situation, and examine what a new theory of body/environment might look like.
Lennard Davis, in his work on visualizing the disabled body, argues that at root the body is inherently and always already fragmented. The unified “whole body” is, therefore, hallucinatory in nature, an imaginary figure through which the body’s multiplicity is repressed. There is much in this view that is consonant with posthumanism, which so often seeks to destabilize the “whole” and singular one in favor of the multiple, the fragmentary, and the hybrid. Yet despite these considerations of the body as fragmentary, little attention has been paid to the value of considering the body not only as fragmentary, but also as potential fragment. What might we learn by rejecting anthropocentric assumptions about the body-mind’s inherent completeness, and exploring the radically plural ontologies offered by visions of shared, joint, or group body-minds? In this paper, I turn to science fiction as a source of such visions, considering depictions of symbiotic and hive minds through the non-traditional models of ontology and agency. While science fiction has traditionally represented plural being as a troubling and fearful injury to wholeness, I highlight the symbiotic Tok’ra of television series Stargate SG-1 as a model of excess being that not only challenges the naturalization of the “complete” body, but also asks us to interrogate presumed boundaries between self and other.
In the 2006 film Pu-239 (The Half-Life of Timofey Berezin), Timofey Berezin (Paddy Considine), a Russian worker at a nuclear reprocessing plant, receives a lethal dose of radiation during a preventable criticality accident. Knowing that he is, in effect, already dead, he steals one hundred grams of weapons-grade plutonium from the plant and embarks on a circuitous journey through the criminal underworld of 1995 Moscow, intent on selling the plutonium to provide for his wife and son— only to end up shot dead, his wife left to leverage the irradiated objects he has buried as insurance. Peter van Wyck has suggested that our preference for burying nuclear waste stems from “an odd fascination with a certain function of death, with making these materials die,” in spite of the fact that the tactic of burial arises from the very refusal of such materials to die. Timofey Berezin— a “walking ghost” who straps plutonium to himself, transforming himself into a radioactive assemblage— thus embodies uneasy qualities of the radioactive, which is at once agential and inanimate, dead and undead. Like the plutonium he carries, he is decaying from the inside out— his body and environment moving into the surreal realm of the “nuclear uncanny” (Masco) as he enacts radiation’s nonlocal and transgressive paths. However, in this paper I argue that it is precisely Timofey’s “already dead”-ness that enables his resistance, and that of those around him: in other words, his power is contingent upon his undead status. Reading the film through the lens of Roy Scranton’s How to Die in the Anthropocene, I ask what conclusions we can productively draw about the power of dead in an Anthropocene world where the boundaries between life and death (and, drawing on Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies, Life and Nonlife) are increasingly unclear.
9. "The disconnected: Imagining material-infrastructural rights." Prose Studies 38.1 (2016): 34-49.
This paper examines discourse around the positioning of Internet access as a human right, including global access campaigns (A Human Right, One Laptop Per Child), hacktivist responses to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Internet blackout, and rhetoric employed by political and technological leaders. The language surrounding the “access as human right” debate, I argue, has largely re-presented the Bildungsroman narrative that Joseph Slaughter finds embedded in international human rights discourse. However, the materiality of Internet access and the networks it requires has also asserted its visibility in ways that draw attention to the human-material anatomy of infrastructure. Drawing on John Durham Peters’ philosophy of infrastructuralism, Judith Butler’s work on bodily vulnerability, and new materialist notions of human and nonhuman networks, I suggest that this inescapable materiality is the most valuable contribution of “access as human right” discourse, and that it points us productively toward a theory of rights that visibilizes and values the material and the infrastructural.
Fiction:
"Tom, Thom" Tor.com: 3 February 2016
"The Earth and Everything Under" Shimmer No. 19
"The Keats Variation" Strange Horizons: 4 June 2012
"The Bird Country" Shimmer No. 15
"Bullet Oracle Instinct" Shimmer No. 13
"Wellspring" The Masters Review 2012. Ed. Lauren Groff.
"Seven Spells to Sever the Heart" Fantasy Magazine: November 2011
"Thou Earth, Thou" Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 27.